Essay and a poem which interrupted a perfectly good sleep

You should listen to Waylon Jennings (and Willie) sing this. Makes much better reading with a sound track, everything's better with a sound track. My dreams certainly are.

        I had a dream which seemed to tell me in some urgent way to wake up and grab a pen.   It lied.  It was not urgent.     
        I pulled up to the railroad crossing just as the light started flashing, the bells ringing and the barrier arms started down.  No train in sight, so I had that old time impulse to make a run across the tracks, but I set it aside.  I had many stupid ideas as a young man and they were almost never worth the thrill.  This knowledge is a result of acting upon and then looking back over a lot stupid ideas to learn this.
        My hands rested on the steering wheel of an old Ford F-100, late 40’s, deep red with all the curves you could want.  Only the red light on the other side of the tracks worked.  I could see it playing on the hood, the only part of this truck that had any kind of shine to it.  My roommate had started on the spraying and had gotten that far.  I was listening to Waylon Jennings singing “Luckenbach Texas”.  I like the last chorus when Willie joins in.  He changes the chrous and sings, “Hank Williams pain songs and Jerry Jeff train songs...”  I loved Jerry Jeff.  The train car arrived with several tremendous blasts of the horn before, during and after the crossing.  The Doppler Effect raised, then lowered the pitch as it passed by.
        In my headlights I can see containers from Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, B & O and some I didn’t recognize.  I felt that slight sorrow that I had never jumped a train.  Then I remembered that both my sons had.  The sorrow quickly faded and in its stead I felt that pride when your sons have also done stupid things and came out okay. 
        I saw empty cattle cars which always reminds me of mankind’s greatest shame, transporting people and animals.  Now comes several flatcars, dead empty and I think that somebody is losing money on them.  Some of those container boxes may be empty as well and who would ever know, but I think it’s unlikely.  Who pays to send an empty container somewhere?  You can’t stay in business doing that.
        Now come a dozen coal cars, heaped up high in the angle of repose sloping upward from either end to the center of the car where the coal chute dumped its load, somewhere way back down the track.  Next come cars stacked high with lumber.  I recognize Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific as they flash by, fifty cars at least, enough for a subdivision.  I wonder how many train cars of wood I've nailed down.
     There used to be some kind of caboose at the end of trains, with their raised roofline, dashing along like a goofy looking prefab house in a hurry to make it to the trailer park before closing time.  These days it’s usually another engine car or two, depending on how much push they need.  I saw two here, so maybe most of those boxes were full after all, which I find reassuring.
       In between each of the several hundred cars, the single red light on the opposite side of the tracks blinked occasionally, depending on whether it was on during the momentary interval between the cars, directly above the linkages.  Only when the empty flatcars were rolling by could I see the steady blinking.  When the last of the engine cars chugged past, pushing their enormous load, the roar of their engines faded away.  I could now hear the crossing bells again but only briefly as they were cut off by the raising arm, the way a conductor does, and the light stopped flashing.
       Feeling mature merely by not doing something stupid, I dropped the shift on the steering column into drive and rumbled across the tracks.


The Freight Cars

When I lay down to sleep
I am mostly interested in sleeping.
Just because a string of words
decides to start marching across
my mind does not mean
I must rouse myself
and write them down.

I can see them
like a train passing
before me, each car
freighted with words,
some stacked high
heavy and dark, like coal,
some like an empty cattle car,
shiny and forbidding
on their way to,
or from, misery.
All these are strung together,
hitched into a hopeful sentence,
saying, “Look at me.
I have something to say.”

But I do not have to rise.
Just because
a thought is thought,
does not mean
it deserves to be recorded
or worth stolen sleep.
This being a prime example.